What is the impact of an increase of lower-ability students in a university class? We examine a natural experiment from Greece in which students from large, low-income families had the chance to transfer to academic programs at a local university. Multiple law changes meant that there was large, quasi-random variability in the number of transferred students over time. We create a new dataset and show that the social policy had a negative educational impact by uniformly lowering recipient students' academic performance once the proportion of transferred students exceeded a certain threshold.

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28 April 2022     Paper Number CEPDP1851

Download PDF - Social policy gone bad educationally: unintended peer effects from transferred students

This CEP discussion paper is published under the centre's Education programme.